Choosing PPC or SEO

SEO and PPC are the two most common and most wide reaching online marketing strategies, however they have very different mechanisms and require a different approach to be successful.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) when completed successfully helps you to appear high in the organic search results on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines without needing to pay the search engines a penny. It is a great medium to long-term strategy which gives you repeat sales and can also be useful for promoting recurring events.

PPC (Pay Per Click)puts an advert for your site in the Sponsored Links section on Google (if you run a Google Adwords campaign) and Bing / Yahoo (if you create a Bing Ads campaign), as well as on their corresponding advertising network on a multitude of websites. It gives quick results and is ideal for advertising one-off events and special offers.

For both PPC and SEO campaigns it’s best to target keywords that:

Have a lot of monthly searches

Give a good Return on Investment

Have a relatively low competition vs. Return on Investment

For PPC you can use Google’s keyword planner (only accessible if you have an Adwords account) to look for keywords that have:

Highly monthly search volumes

A low suggested bid

A low competition

It’s then a case of choosing relevant, incoming generating keywords.

For SEO the competition shown in Google’s keyword planner is meaningless and there’s only a weak correlation between PPC competition and SEO competition.

If you’d like us to analyse the SEO competition for a range of keywords, just get in touch, alternatively to find keywords that have a low SEO competition, search for your target keyword in the search engine of your choice and look for keywords where the results:

Don’t have 1,000s of links to them.

Have low Domain Authority (see Moz.com).

Include some pages that aren’t highly relevant.

You can also check to see if the .com, .net or .org are available for your chosen keywords. If they are, it indicates that there’s likely to be less SEO competition.

Both SEO and PPC can be useful for local, national and international campaigns, however be sure that your target audience is truly international if using a PPC campaign, as you pay every time someone visits your website. If you sell a product which is distributed from one country only, for example, then your almost certainly best targeting your PPC campaign just to that one country and trusting that you will receive visitors from any potential international clients as a result of your SEO campaign.

SEO and PPC working in harmony

With a carefully managed campaign, you can attract a broader audience with your SEO campaign and target your PPC campaign just on keywords that give you a high Return on Investment, this way SEO and PPC will work together in harmony.